The wooden gates were half-opened. The left-hand gate drooped sadly to the ground.
Marsden would have led, but Charles stepped in. “Let Anna and me lead. We don’t know what we’ll find, and the two of us are less likely to get hurt if it’s bad.”
Marsden retreated with his hands up. “All right.”
“And stay with us,” Charles added. “If this is the fae’s home, he is unlikely to run.” This was why he didn’t like working with humans: they died too easily. “Stay with us and we’ll do what we can to keep you alive if it attacks.”
Leslie pulled her weapon and held it down against her leg. “We’ll do the same for you,” she said dryly.
He smiled at her and then ducked through the person-sized gap between the tall gates, Anna at his side.
This was not the first dangerous situation Anna had strolled into at her husband’s side. She was, if she felt like being honest, pretty humiliated by her performance with the fae in Ms. Jamison’s garden. Big bad werewolf reduced to shivers by a wussy little garden fae. What was it Charles had called it? A wearden.
Humiliation was better than the shiver of horror that the thought of Justin called up. Funny, she didn’t remember being that terrified of him while he was alive. Terrified, yes, but reduced to shivering like a jellyfish, no. Maybe the wearden’s magic had done something to make her fear worse. But if so, why did her stomach still ache?
But she had a job to do, and she shoveled Justin to the dark dungeon in her mind where she kept him and he only bothered her in her nightmares.
Inside the walls, the yard was barren, not xeriscaped, but zero-scaped. Red soil with patches of dead vegetation provided no cover for anything to hide behind. She breathed in deeply but smelled nothing unusuaclass="underline" no magic, no fae, nothing but dust.
And yet … she put her nose down and half crept, half walked. Her ears drooped slightly in unease that was not, she didn’t think, spawned from her earlier fright.
Do you have anything? Charles asked her.
Her lips pulled up involuntarily, a threat display of teeth for— Nothing, she told him, and yet …
She shivered in the warmth of the high sun. It was not summer, but in Scottsdale that didn’t mean it wasn’t warm, nearly eighty degrees. She could smell the others’ sweat.
I let that fae spook me, she told him. I’m overreacting.
He shook his head. No birds, no insects, nothing living here at all. There are ghosts here; they burn my skin with their breath. Stay alert.
“In the front door?” asked Leslie.
“If he’s in there, he already knows we are here,” Charles told her. “Front door, back door, or down the chimney, we’re not going to have surprise on our side.” He added, “I don’t smell anyone. Anna?”
She jerked her head in a negative, but a growl rumbled in her chest. Do you feel it?
“Yes,” he said, putting his hand on her head. “The dead have a weight here. This place is haunted in the true Navajo sense. I can feel it try to cling.”
“Don’t try to give us courage, now,” said Marsden dryly. “I feel so much better after that speech.”
Her mate gave him a smile. He didn’t usually give people smiles until he had known them for a lot longer, at least not friendly smiles.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anyone alive here,” Charles said. “Does that help?”
“Not really,” said Leeds. “No.”
“No,” agreed Leslie.
The front door was locked. When no one answered Marsden’s vigorous knocking, Leeds took a roll of handy-dandy lockpick tools out of his pocket and went to work on the lock.
Anna conceived an instant desire to learn how. It didn’t look too complicated. Charles probably knew how. He could teach her.
“Get your nose back, ma’am, please,” said Leeds. “You aren’t in the way. But I have a hard time concentrating with a freaking werewolf breathing down my neck.”
“She won’t hurt you,” murmured Charles.
“I know that,” Leeds said calmly, still wiggling the delicate picks, one in each hand, his head tilted so one ear was nearer the lock than the other. “My brain does anyway. My gut says, ‘Run away, run away, you freaking moron. That’s a werewolf.’”
Anna backed up. She tried looking through the windows, but the blinds were down and turned so she couldn’t see anything. She could positively say that no living creature had been on this porch for a long time. She got a faint whiff of perfume, presumably belonging to whoever had rented the house, but nothing else. If the fae had been to this door, it hadn’t been for a long time.
The lock gave up and the door admitted them into an empty living room that smelled of dust and cleaners that made Anna sneeze. She trotted past Leslie and into the main house, which was as barren as the rest. She caught faint scents of humans who had once lived here: a girl in the pink room and someone who smoked cigarettes in the master bedroom. They’d had a dog, too. Helpfully, all of the doors were open, so she didn’t have to wait for someone with hands to let her into anywhere. The bedrooms and bathrooms were a bust, as far as her nose went, anyway. From the sounds in the living room, someone had found something.
In the kitchen there was a ladder nailed into the wall, painted cream with mint-green, tole-painted leaves to turn it into a decoration. At the top of the ladder was a locked trapdoor in the ceiling with a note taped to it: RENTERS NOT ALLOWED IN ATTIC.
She put her nose on the ladder and smelled nothing. But it wasn’t like the house was Hosteen’s mansion. There weren’t many places to hide things, and a locked door looked interesting. She climbed up to the trapdoor, digging her claws into the wood and leaving indentations behind. The narrow edge of the two-by-four ladder hurt her paws, and she thought maybe she should let one of the comfortably shod people try this. Not to mention, werewolf bodies were not exactly designed to climb ladders. It was an older house, and the ceilings were high, maybe ten feet or more.
She smelled nothing more up at the top than she had at the bottom. She pushed her nose against the trapdoor, and it wiggled a little. As soon as the edge of the door broke contact with the frame, scent wafted out of the attic only to disappear as soon as the door settled again.
But that was enough. She smelled the little girl whose grubby rabbit was in a plastic bag back in their room at the Sanis’ ranch.
She dropped to the ground and ran to Charles.
In the living room they had pulled up some stone around the fireplace and were looking into a metal-lined hole filled with not much.
I found her, she told Charles, and then ran back to the kitchen, claws catching on the tile floor. This time she bolted up the ladder and hit the trapdoor with her shoulder as hard as she could. Wood cracked and she bounced down to the ground. When she looked up, the door was still intact. She ran up and hit it again and this time when she landed, the door landed with her, in three pieces with a fourth still attached to the ceiling.
The reek of death, old death and new blood, billowed through the kitchen. Of the others, only Charles caught the full brunt of it.
He pulled his forearm up to his nose. “Stay down here,” he ordered.
Anna didn’t wait, though. There was a child up there who was bound to be hurt and scared, a child who had been held captive for months. She scrambled through the hole at the top of the ladder, ignoring Charles’s impassioned “Anna!”
The attic space was stuffy and hot, a room of maybe twenty by twenty with a ten-foot-tall ceiling that sloped down sharply with the slant of the roof until on two sides it was only three feet high. The old-fashioned linoleum, marbled army green, was cooler than the air and reminded Anna of photos of her grandmother’s house.